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Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

a16z.com

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Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#31

Post by jsheard »

xadhominemx wrote: post #23
jsheard wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technical expertise of... buying four of the fanciest Nvidia GPU and plugging them into an off-the-shelf motherboard in an off-the-shelf chassis? A serious attempt at this kind of build would use the server variant of the RTX6000 and custom air ducts to cool them efficiently, but they packed four blower coolers like sardines so it no doubt sounds like a screaming jet engine under load.

Exactly, 4 blower GPUs!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvBeCSaaDxA

What did you say?? I can't hear you over these blowers!!

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#32

Post by vlabakje90 »

perdomon wrote: post #25

How much heat does it generate and how loud is it at full tilt? Try keep comparing it to a modern under-desk computer, but I’m not sure you’d want to have that thing in the same room while you’re using it?

According to the specifications the max power draw is 1650W. All of that is converted into heat so it's like a small space heater.

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#33

Post by doctoboggan »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #18
orionsbelt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VC is a marketing game. You want to be attractive to founders, so that the best founders/companies come to you and want to choose you.

But is gassing up founders something they want? Idk, maybe. But just remember these guys crypto play and it feels like they'll just yes man you off a cliff if you're a founder...

Yes people like that even if they think it doesn't work on them. Just like people who say advertising doesn't work on them when it really does work on us all.

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#35

Post by ekianjo »

transpute wrote: post #24

> personal AI Workstation delivers complete control over your environment, latency reduction, custom configurations and setups, and the privacy of running all workloads locally. What's the recommended operating system with support for this hardware and local compute without cloud telemetry/identity?

linux?

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#36

Post by earthnail »

jsheard wrote: post #13
aliljet wrote: post #8

This article is a great way to showcase A16Z standinging head and shoulders above other VCs with REAL technical expertise in the partnership. Love reading this kind of stuff, but the article really needs a price to put this in perspective. It would be the VC that would ignore price, lol, but roughing this out it looks like it costs 45k to build this thing. Seems, at first glance, that this is a cost efficient way to…

The technical expertise of... buying four of the fanciest Nvidia GPU and plugging them into an off-the-shelf motherboard in an off-the-shelf chassis? A serious attempt at this kind of build would use the server variant of the RTX6000 and custom air ducts to cool them efficiently, but they packed four blower coolers like sardines so it no doubt sounds like a screaming jet engine under load.

In all fairness, not even Lambda Labs offers workstations with RTX6000 server variants.

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#37

Post by eagerpace »

This is the not-so-distant-future that a lot of people don’t see. We’re in the AI mainframe era and it’s coming to the pc era soon. I hope that’s what Apple is waiting on. Perhaps we will buy LLMs and install them locally one day too like a video game.

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#38

Post by anaisbetts »

evrimoztamur wrote: post #4

Are they going to gift it to the POTUS for some favours or what now? Apple's gold bar type s...

It's gaudy as fuck but the charitable explanation is that they're mimicing the nVidia DGX aesthetic rather than Trump, which would at least make sense

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#39

Post by danjl »

If you actually want a good multi-GPU system, just get an NVIDIA-designed system. There's no good reason to try to design and build one yourself when you will be relying almost entirely on NVIDIA cards and their multi-GPU communication.
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